Learning in/through Public Space: Young Girls and Feminist Consciousness-raising

Abstract

This chapter seeks to explore how the young girls of a feminist group think and act politically in their urban environment, and specifically how, through their experiences, they manage their intersecting oppressions and look for strategies to combat them. The aim is to show how they think reflectively about their experiences in the public space, manage their intersected oppressions and find individual and collective strategies to struggle transform or resist. Through their awareness of their oppression and understanding themselves as a political issue in a process of consciousness-raising they become empowered both personal and collectively. The way they share their personal experiences, develop their own tools to strengthen them and take actions to make them known are processes and practices of informal education important to be considered.

We are a collective of feminist women who come together to raise our own consciousness and try to show others the inequalities and violence that women continue to suffer because of the patriarchal system, which assigns specific roles to the female sex and others to the male sex, given men the dominant place in society and relegating women to second place, dependent on them. We want to put an end to the physical, psychological and moral violence that women suffer in everyday life.¹

Acció Lila